Stitched Networks

2019 ◽  
pp. 149-168
Author(s):  
Stephanie Beck Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
West African ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
New Nation

This essay investigates how the art of Liberian quilters functioned in diplomatic and social contexts; that is, how women visual artists actively shaped cultural diplomacy in nineteenth and twentieth century transatlantic history. Such an examination inserts an absent historical voice--a female West African international traveler--into the corpus of black women traveling internationally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essay traces the development of quilting, the gentile??? Victorian art, as the Liberian diplomatic gift and asks how and why quilting retains this role after the civil war at the end of the twentieth century. By focusing on an artistic tradition absent from scholarship on Liberian material culture, this essay offers female perspectives on the establishment of a new nation.

Hitting two birds with one stone: An afterword on archeology and the history of science

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-391
Author(s):  
Mirjam Brusius
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Institutional Infrastructure ◽  
History Of

This afterword comments on the articles gathered together in this special section of History of Science (“Disassembling Archaeology, Reassembling the Modern World”). Criticizing the consistent lack of institutional infrastructure for histories of archaeology in the history of science, the piece argues that scholars should recognize the commonality of archaeology’s practices with those of the nineteenth and twentieth century field sciences that have received more historical attention. The piece also suggests avenues to help take this approach further, such as combining expertise from historians of the biological sciences and of antiquarianism and archaeology to look at the history of the understanding of human variation and race. Finally, the afterword suggests that scholars should reconsider the idea of archaeology’s reliance on institutionalised practices, thinking about the use and re-use of material culture in more diverse and pragmatic social contexts.

Standard Bearers: Material Culture and Middle-Class Communities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Moskowitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business History ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Marketing Department ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

A generation of historians, working at the intersection of business history and cultural history, has examined the consumer culture that flourished in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In studies of advertising, marketing, department stores, credit systems, and other aspects of selling and buying, these scholars have shown that American businesses not only produced consumer goods but also created consumer desire.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Arctic Circle ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

The Coin of the African Realm

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herbst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Regional Economies ◽  
African Countries ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter examines the politics of the currency in West Africa from the beginning of the twentieth century. A public series of debates over the nature of the currency occurred in West Africa during both the colonial and independence periods. Since 1983, West African countries have been pioneers in Africa in developing new strategies to combat overvaluation of the currency and reduce the control of government over the currency supply. The chapter charts the evolution of West African currencies as boundaries and explores their relationship to state consolidation. It shows that leaders in African capitals managed to make the units they ruled increasingly distinct from the international and regional economies, but the greater salience of the currency did not end up promoting state consolidation. Rather, winning the ability to determine the value of the currency led to a series of disastrous decisions that severely weakened the states themselves.

Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music

2000 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Contemporary Practice ◽  
Flea Market ◽  
Musical Styles

Abstract: The twentieth century ended with the widespread conversion of cultural artefacts into digital information. Less attention has been granted to the ways in which cultural artefacts accumulate in the form of "things"-tangible books, recordings, and other objects whose economic value has often withered. This article examines the question of cultural waste and looks at those commercial and social institutions (such as the flea market and garage sale) which have evolved in order to keep old cultural commodities circulating. The recycling of old musical styles within contemporary practice is examined as one means of retrieving and revalorizing cultural waste. Résumé: La transposition massive d'artefacts culturels sous forme digitale a marqué la fin du 20e siècle. En revanche, on a porté moins d'attention à l'accumulation de ces artefacts sous forme de «choses»-livres, enregistrements et autres objets matériaux dont la valeur marchande a fortement diminué dans bien des cas. Cet article examine la question de détritus culturels, et jette un regard sur les institutions commerciales et sociales (telles que le marché aux puces et la vente de garage) qui ont évolué afin de garder les vieux biens culturels en circulation. En outre, l'article examine le recyclage d'anciens styles musicaux dans la pratique contemporaine, à titre d'exemple de récupération et de remise en valeur de détritus culturels.

Eating Out in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Changes in Food and in Social Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Quality Of Food ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Eating Out ◽  
Gender And Nation ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the impact of rapid urbanization and industrialization on food and eating out. It draws attention to the growing standardization of food and, with greater class differentiation, to the growing diversity in eating-out venues. Class, gender, and nation are again used as lenses to understand the different eating-out habits and their symbolic significance. Towards the end of the twentieth century, pubs moved more fully towards embracing dining. However, the quality of food, in general terms, began to improve significantly only towards the end of the century, and hospitality venues also moved towards selling food from diverse national origins.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

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